Modernism in Portugal
Portugal was much influenced by French art and some painters and poets had life experiences in Paris in the beginning of the 20th century. One of those painters was Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, who died young in 1917, at 30, of the epidemic spanish flu. He remained unknown and his work was undervalued for many decades. As he was ill for a long period at his family's home, he painted a lot, but it seems that his family didn't value his work and many paintings were destroyed by fire after his death.
He gets acquainted with Modigliani, Brancusi and Archipenko and, later on, with the couple Delaunay and through them with other famous artists and poets like Apollinaire, Picabia, Chagall, Boccioni, Klee, etc.
Amadeo exhibits also in the Armory Show, in NY, in 1913 and in Berlin Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon , with the italian futurists and Blaue Reiter movement.
As many other artists of the time he made collage.
There's a famous cubist painting, named Head, by Santa Rita, inspired by african masks, as modern primitivists admired, and with curve movement lines as the futurists liked (Boccioni sculptures).
Santa Rita was a friend of other portuguese modernists like Amadeo and Almada, but as Amadeo he also died young, at 29, victim of tuberculosis, and as a dying wish determined that all his paintings should be destroyed, so there are only a few drawings that he published in the poetry magazine Orpheu and this «Head» and nothing else survived. He was one of the leaders of Futurism in Portugal and this is one of his «cool» photos in an extravagant outfit.
Almada Negreiros (1893-1970) was an ecletic intelectual, a multidisciplinary artist who introduced futurism and is the central icon of portuguese modernism. He has no academic background but he is a great talent and a strong personality, extremely disruptive either as a painter or as a writer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_de_Almada_Negreiros
He also went to Paris and contacted many of the modern artists of the early modernist generation, but he believed that art required a homeland context. His work is quite impressive with the famous mosaic panels of the maritime station in Lisbon.
